As their chief spoke loudly, Marcus caught sight through the haze of snow which seemed to hold the darkness of night above, the head of a column of the foot soldiers making a steady advance, looking as if they were wearing a fresh form of decoration, every man's helmet plume being increased in size by a trimming of the purest, whitest swans-down or filmy, flocculent silver itself.

She would have embarked in a noble barge, and lain upon couches of swans-down, and ample awnings of silk would have sheltered her from the sun, while the beautiful craft floated away down the river, its crimson hangings here and there just touching the rippling waters.

Love, or the Countess and the Serf, by J. Sheridan Knowles -- I see that still as the blazonry of one of them, just as I see Miss Emily Mestayer, large, red in the face, coifed in a tangle of small, fine, damp-looking short curls and clad in a light-blue garment edged with swans-down, shout at the top of her lungs that a "pur-r-r-se of gold" would be the fair guerdon of the minion who should start on the spot to do her bidding at some desperate crisis that I forget.

For (was it the music of the duets? he asked himself next morning, with a certain distaste as he remembered it all, or the heady Spanish wines poured out so freely in those narrow but deep Venetian glasses?) on this evening he approached more nearly than he had ever yet done to Mademoiselle van Westrheene, as she sat there beside the clavecin looking very ruddy and fresh in her white satin, trimmed with glossy crimson swans-down.